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6 ‘‘Jewgreek is greekjew’’ Messianicity—Khōra—Democracy In Chapter 3 we claimed that Derrida identifies two sources of religion, one of which is the common source of both religion and science, namely, a kind of originary or elementary faith, the ‘‘barest foundation’’ of every social bond. This reading of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ is justified by just about everything Derrida says about these two sources in this essay and in the texts we have been reading around it. There are, however, a few places in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ where Derrida’s language lends itself to some ambiguity with regard to these sources. One such passage is found at the end of §20, where Derrida says he wishes to ‘‘give two names to the duplicity of these origins,’’ to ‘‘name these two sources, these two fountains or these two tracks that are still invisible in the desert,’’ to ‘‘lend them two names that are still ‘historical.’ ’’1 Given everything said thus far about the ‘‘two sources’’ of religion, we might expect Derrida to go on to speak of an experience of the sacred that must remain indemnified, on the one hand, and a testimonial act of faith, on the other. Instead, Derrida goes on to write: ‘‘To do this, let us refer—provisionally, I emphasize this, and for pedagogical or rhetorical reasons—first to the ‘messianic,’ and second to the khōra, as I have tried to do more minutely, more patiently and, I hope, more rigorously elsewhere’’ (§20). Though Derrida’s language of ‘‘sources’’ and ‘‘fountains’’ at the beginning of this passage would lead the reader to believe that he is talking about the two sources of religion as I have identified them, we soon see 152 that Derrida is instead gesturing in the direction of khōra and the messianic —both of which are to be identified, as I hope to demonstrate more clearly in what follows, with the second source of religion and not with the two sources. A more complete reading of this passage, which begins, ‘‘Noctural light, therefore, more and more obscure,’’ and which goes on to speak of ‘‘the ambiguity or the duplicity of the religious trait or retreat, of its abstraction or of its subtraction,’’ would confirm this suggestion.2 The duplicity Derrida is speaking of here is thus not that of the two sources of religion but of two ‘‘historical’’ names for the second source, two names from two ‘‘historical’’ traditions, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek, as well as two different orientations or valences for this second source, one essentially temporal (the messianic) and the other essentially spatial (khōra), even if, of course, our notions of time and space will have to be rethought on the basis of these names. That these two names are indeed to be thought in temporal and spatial terms can be seen in a passage from ‘‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum),’’ where Derrida speaks of two ‘‘abysses,’’ one related to eschatology and historical revelation, terms linked throughout ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ to the messianic, and the other to ‘‘nontemporality ’’ and ‘‘an absolute impassibility . . . that gives rise to everything that it is not,’’ terms related to khōra: This exemplarism joins and disjoins at once . . .: on one side, on one way, a profound and abyssal eternity, fundamental but accessible to messianism in general, to the tele-eschatological narrative and to a certain experience or historical (or historial) revelation; on the other side, on the other way, the nontemporality of an abyss without bottom or surface, an absolute impassibility (neither life nor death) that gives rise to everything that it is not. In fact, two abysses. (‘‘SN’’ 77) Once again, it is as if Derrida is suggesting that in order to think religion today and the ‘‘bare’’ foundation that makes it possible, one must rethink not only the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic messianic tradition by means of what Derrida will call a ‘‘messianicity without messianism,’’ but the Greek philosophical tradition by means of something that will have resisted Greek thought from within and from the very beginning, namely, khōra. It is in this chiasm between the messianic and khōra, between a rethinking of temporality and a reinscription of spatiality, between the religions of the Book and Plato’s Timaeus—this ‘‘Bible avant la lettre’’ (‘‘AV’’ 12)—that Derrida might say again what he said in ‘‘Violence and Metaphysics ’’ with a line from Joyce: ‘‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet’’ (see WD 153). ‘‘Jewgreek...

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